Chapter 13
Decker
Pre-dawn, and I don’t sleep. I sit with my back to the cave wall, lantern turned low, watching the entrance. No signs of anything all night. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe.
I run the problem again, because that’s what I do when I’m stuck. Turn the thing until a solution shows itself.
No solution shows itself.
I can’t hold her here indefinitely, but I can’t let her out either.
The Syndicate will be working the roads out of town by now, slow and thorough, with Viktor’s trackers not far behind.
I can’t take her to Aurora—the evidence he found would swallow her before anyone thought to question it.
Aside from me. And the question I’m asking right now is how they dug up proof that put her in places I know she hadn’t been.
Something is off. And we’re stuck here until I figure it out.
Three walls. No door.
Twenty years in this work, and I’ve never once sat in a hole without a next move.
What I’ve got instead is yesterday—every step of it the bear’s, not mine.
Pulled her out of the alley. Drove north.
Brought her here. The man who works from evidence has been a passenger since town, and the part I keep circling is that I’m not looking very hard for a way to take the wheel back.
She’s been still on the cot for hours.
I watch her.
Awake, she’s never truly in focus. That flicker she runs—the one that affects other people and has never once worked on me.
She tried in the yard that first morning, and I watched her face when it didn’t take.
She tried again in the supply room. Same result.
I read scent and heat. There’s nothing she can do about that.
But she’s kept the low burn of it going even up here, with no one to hide from but me.
Habit, worn so deep she doesn’t feel herself doing it.
Asleep, it’s off. All of it.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her without the magic, and it tells me more than a week of questions would. Hiding isn’t something she does. It’s how she lives.
The fur is over her now, on top of the blanket.
I put it there in the early hours, when the cold came down off the rock and she curled tighter without waking.
I don’t remember deciding to. I was sitting, and then I was standing over her with the fur in my hands, and I don’t know how I got there.
I keep doing that around her. Move first. Understand later, or not at all.
I keep looking at her, now that I have the freedom to.
She’s slight. Fine-boned. Her pulse beats at her throat, slow and steady beneath skin so delicate it seems translucent.
The bear hasn’t stirred in hours. He’s lying down inside me with his eyes open, focused on the cot.
They brought me in to find something dangerous, and she’s not it. My instincts won’t let me hand her over to a system that believes otherwise.
She’s something to protect.
I know it, even though I keep trying to argue that I might be wrong. The bear isn’t listening.
I turn back to the lantern.
Her eyes open.
She makes a sound—small, sharp, cut off—and for one breath everything is on her face before she can hide it. Then it’s gone. She sits up, pushes her hair back, and takes in the cave again. Boulder. Lantern. Me. By the time she’s done, she’s herself again.
“You’ve been sitting there all night,” she says.
“Most of it.”
“Were you watching me sleep?” She frowns.
“We’re in the same cave. Where else would I look?”
“I don’t know. The floor? The walls? Watching a woman sleep all night is creeper shit.”
I don’t answer. There’s no defense. I was watching her.
She takes one breath. “I need to leave here. Today.”
“That’s not happening.”
“Why?”
I look at her.
“If you have a plan, tell me what it is. If you’re still working on one, say that. Give me something I can work with.”
“When there’s a plan,” I say, “you’ll know.”
The most honest answer I can give her. She draws a slow breath and holds everything behind her face. She’s been running angles since the truck—quiet, patient, never the same one twice. Looking for the soft spot in me.
There’s no soft spot. I don’t tell her that. I don’t need to.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she says.
I look around the cave, frowning.
The cave does not have a bathroom.
A person being kept needs a bathroom. That’s not complicated. I’ve run surveillance holds for weeks. Tracked wilderness for months. I’ve thought through every problem keeping her here creates except the most basic one.
“There’s no facility in here,” I say.
“I figured as much. So…what? You expect me to go in the corner? Because this place is going to smell like a latrine before long.”
“I’ll take you outside.”
“That’s the first useful thing you’ve said.”
I cross to her and bind her wrists—not too tight, but tight enough to matter.
She flinches, then goes still and lets me work.
That sudden switch from fight to flat. I’ve seen it before.
In people who learned somewhere that resisting costs more than it buys.
I don’t like what it tells me about what she’s lived through.
I roll the boulder and take her down the path to the tree belt, twelve yards out.
I check the rope length. The sightlines back to the entrance. The approach from below.
She’s looking at me.
I’m facing her.
“If you’d like to watch me pee,” she says, “I can give you a minute to decide.”
I turn.
“Thank you,” she says to my back.
“Sure.” I shift my feet.
“I had a functioning toilet yesterday morning.” Her voice comes from behind the trees. “A door that locked from the inside. Tea.”
I watch the ridge. Nothing on the slope. Sky going gray at the far end, maybe forty minutes to first light.
“You’re holding a rope attached to a person, and that’s messed up. I hope you know that.”
The Syndicate will have been on the roads since midnight, spreading south and east. Buys time. Not much.
“Are you looking at the ridge so you don’t have to look at me?”
“Yes.”
A sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “At least you’re honest about some things.”
The bear comes up off his haunches to listen. Head tipped toward her voice. If he had his way, we’d be standing closer.
She steps out from behind the trees, straightening her clothes, still talking—the cold, the hour, the state of the path—and I keep my eyes on the ridge but keep the rest of my attention on what she’s actually doing.
Her head isn’t tracking the trees around her.
It’s tracking south, toward the gap in the canopy that runs downhill to the lower road.
She’s reading the slope through it without turning her head.
Quiet. Observant. The complaints are for show.
She’s trying to distract me from the fact that she’s looking for escape routes.
“This is not how I saw my week going,” she says. “Yesterday I had a schedule.”
She’s measuring the slope.
I don’t let my shoulders change. But I know this much now: if I turn my back on her out here, she runs.
I give the rope a small tug.
She stumbles a step forward. “Nice,” she mutters. “Why don’t you put a collar on me too? You can teach me to heel. Sit. Stay. Roll over.”
The bear rumbles. He’s enjoying her.
We go back inside. I set the boulder, untie her wrists, put water where she can reach it. She drinks without a word and wraps the blanket around her shoulders.
“You’ve been working with the Syndicate,” I say.
“You’ve already decided that. Why ask?”
“I’m not asking.”
“Then you’ve misread what you think you saw. I was in town on a supply run—”
“You parked the van and walked to the service road behind the hardware store. You stood in an empty lane and waited. You took a call. Then two men came to get you.” I let that sink in. “They called you a loose thread. Loose threads get used first.”
The deflection dies. Not the fight—her chin stays up—but she stops pretending she was there for groceries.
“How long?” I say.
“A few months.”
I turn that over. The leak I’ve been hunting goes back a lot further than a few months. Either she’s lying, and badly, or she’s not the ghost I’ve spent months chasing. Both roads end at the same place: the profile doesn’t fit the woman.
“And before that?”
“Nothing. I didn’t come to Aurora to do this.”
“Nobody volunteers to inform on the people who took them in. So why do it?”
Silence. She looks at the far wall.
I stand.
I know how this part goes. I’ve done it more times than I can count—cross the space slowly, let the size do the talking, stand close enough that the silence gets heavy and the room gets small. Hard men crack under it. It’s ugly, and it works.
I cross to her. Crouch, forearms on my knees, close enough that she has to tip her head back to hold my eyes. I’m in her space.
Her breath changes.
Her pulse jumps at her throat. Fear. That part I expected. But she doesn’t shrink into the wall. Her chin lifts. Color climbs her face, and underneath all of it, her scent shifts. Warms. The bear catches it before I do, and the sound he makes has nothing to do with interrogation.
“Who handles you?” My voice is too low. Not intimidating. Rough.
“I don’t know.” Her voice isn’t steady anymore. “I got instructions. A number that called. I never met anyone. That’s the truth.”
“And you just did what they asked?”
“You have no idea what was at stake.” It cracks in the middle.
Her hands are shaking around the blanket, and she sees me see it.
Something desperate moves through her face before she shuts it all down.
Goes still. Goes flat. The same switch from before, the one that hides everything because somewhere she learned that letting people see costs too much.
I sense the resistance failing. Ten more seconds and she gives me all of it.
But I stand up and step back instead, and I couldn’t say which part of me made that call. Only that it wasn’t the part that’s done this a hundred times.
It’s the part that doesn’t want to scare her.
“Tell me,” I say, from a distance that doesn’t threaten anything.
She doesn’t.
The cave goes quiet and stays that way.
Fine. What she gave me is enough.
The lag before every answer. The lie that’s wrong—a professional lies big or doesn’t bother.
No handler she’s ever laid eyes on. She stood in that road with no cover and no exit, and she had no idea the men coming for her existed until they were practically on top of her.
Nothing about her says she’s trained. Everything about her says someone found leverage and used it against her.
The file Viktor has says otherwise. Skilled. Careful. Six nights in the restricted wing on clean logs. That person exists. I’ve been hunting them for months. But they’re not sitting across this cave with shaking hands and a blanket around their shoulders.
Which means whoever built that file is still inside Aurora. Still working. And they pointed Viktor at her so nobody keeps looking.
I pull the rope into my lap and coil it slowly.
She’s no operative. But she’s sharp. I watched her plot a way down this mountain while complaining about the plumbing, and she almost sold it. The bear thinks that’s the best thing he’s learned all day.
The man knows better. It doesn’t matter what she saw. The boulder is not going to budge. The slope past the gap drops hard before it flattens. She doesn’t know this country, and the ridge is two hours of darkness from anything.
The rope is in my lap. Her wrists don’t need to be tied for her to be bound here.